If they had met sometimes, and by chance, before the families went away, they met now continually, and not by chance.  But as Edgar’s passion and reason were not in accord, he restrained himself, for him marvelously, and neither made love to her in earnest nor flirted with her in jest.  Indeed, Leam was too intense to be approached at any time with levity.  As well dress the Tragic Muse in the costume of a Watteau shepherdess as ply Leam Dundas with the pretty follies found so useful with other women.  She did not understand them, and it seemed useless to try to make her.  If Edgar paid her any of the trivial compliments always on his lips for women, Leam used to look at him with her serious eyes and ask him how could he possibly know what she was like—­he, who scarcely knew her at all.  If he praised her beauty, she used to turn away her head offended and tell him he was rude.  He felt as if he could never touch her, never hold her:  his ways were not as hers; and if her fascination for him increased, so did his trouble.

He was in doubt on both sides—­for her and for himself.  He could not read that silent, irresponsive nature nor measure his influence over her.  By no blushes when they met, no girlish poutings when he kept away, by no covert reproaches, no ill-concealed gladness, no tremors and no consciousness could he gain the smallest clew to guide him.  She was always the same—­grave, gentle, laconic, self-possessed.  But who that looked into her eyes could fail to see underneath her Spanish pride and more than Oriental reserve that fund of passion lying hidden like the waters of an artesian well, waiting only to be brought to the surface?  He had not yet brought that hidden treasure into the light of the sun and of love, and he wondered if ever he should.  And if he should, would it be for happiness?  Leam was the kind of girl to love madly under the orange trees and myrtles, to break one’s heart for when brothers interposed in the moonlight with rapiers and daggers and caught her away for conventual discipline or for marriage with the don; but as the mistress of an English home, the every-day wife of an English squire with a character to keep up and an example to set, was she fit for that?  She was so quaint, so original, there were such depths of passionate thought and feeling side by side with such strange shallows of social and intellectual ignorance—­though reticent she was so direct, though tenacious so simple, her love, if difficult to win, had such marvelous vitality when won—­that he felt as if she spoke a language sweeter and purer in many of its tones than the current speech of society, but a language with which neither his own people nor that society would ever be familiar.